Conventioneers
by KatyaX
Summary: It's been awhile since they've seen each other, and Snape and Hermione still have one last conversation to have before they can move on. You'll have to put some pieces together yourself. I hate weighing a story down with too much backstory.


The cool sand of the Jersey shore molded itself into the small of Hermione Granger's back, welled up behind her knees. It was late, foolishly late, to be alone out on the shore in this part of the state. But Hermione was a witch - a witch who had faced things bigger and scarier than muggers - and she was fairly confident that she could take care of herself.

Besides. She did not anticipate being alone much longer.

He had definitely seen her in the lobby that evening, just before the dinner break. He'd been coming out of his ball room, and she hers. The conference was scheduled to be a three day event, but with one day down already faces were drawn and perhaps a little vacant. Even Hermione confessed to be lost in the semantics. Nevertheless she hadn't gone for recreational purposes but for work. Though she could only guess at how Professor Severus Snape had wound up there. The poor man looked like he'd picked the shortest straw or something else as equally dastardly in its simple irony. Whatever it was, Hermione had a theory that, given the opportunity, Professor Snape would choose the diversion of his least favorite student's company over the evening lecture which followed dinner.

The shuffling of boots over the sand and the resigned exhale of a decidedly British nature confirmed it.

"I don't know what's more disturbing: the fact that I was right about finding you out here -- "

"Or that you didn't turn around the moment you realized it was indeed me?" she finished for him.

"Five years, and you're still finishing my sentences."

"Five years, and you knew where to find me," she smiled. "Some things never change."

"And yet," he sighed, "some others do."

She said nothing to that, allowing him to be cryptic if that was his wish. She sat up as he sat down beside her. He reached behind her and gently but quickly brushed the sand from her back. It was a strange thing, and perhaps someone who knew them both a long time ago would find it uncharacteristically familiar, and therefore odd that it should pass without comment. But Hermione just smiled again and turned her gaze back to the gentle waves of low tide.

"Did you go to the Sommers' debacle?" he asked idly.

"No, but I heard it was total shambles. I was in Erickson's lecture on Arithmantic therapy versus Potions for stroke victims at the time. Total bunk. I'd much have rather watched Sommers make a fool of himself."

Five years, he thought but did not say, and she still talked too much. He'd die before he'd admit it to anyone but he missed it at times. She, at least, could fill a silence with something interesting.

"You can watch him do that just pouring a cup of coffee," Snape scoffed.

"Yes, well, perhaps I would have seen you earlier in the day, then, had I managed to make it."

"Are you trying to tell me that you didn't know I was here before you glimpsed me in the hall?"

"Not a suspicion," she insisted. He smirked and she felt the pangs of indignation stab at her pride. "I did not," she persisted. "What do you think, that I attend lectures in the middle of New Jersey hoping to catch sight of you by chance? I'm here on business." She was a bit annoyed with his smugness, but he'd always been able to do that, so it wasn't so severe.

"I didn't mean anything by it," he drawled easily. "It is an international Potions convention after all."

"Be that as it may, I didn't see you at the last one in Kobe, so I assumed you'd taken yourself out of the loop." She shrugged. "It would have made sense, or I thought so anyway. After you left the Austrian Venenum Consortium you rather fell off the face of the earth, didn't you? Or, at least, the Wizarding World."

"Well, I had a rather good reason for that, didn't I?" he questioned back.

"Oh?"

"I think so. My heart had been completely shattered. Takes a lot out of a man."

He said it so simply that it caught her off guard. She thought quickly back to a mad bout of sex in his swivel desk chair in his office at the Consortium, the morning he had her against his parents' bedroom door in his house, the time she'd slipped her hand under his dress robes at the Lloyd Brothers' Company rendition of Carmen. The time she threw a lamp at him in such furious anger that she scared even herself… Could all that break a man? Wasn't Snape supposed to be unbreakable?

"You broke my heart first," she said quietly and evenly. "That doesn't make what I did right," she added. "It just… Tells you what I had to work with."

"Yes," he said after a moment. "I was rather an arse about the whole thing, wasn't I?"

Hermione listened to the scratchy roar of the waves rushing to shore. She tried to slow her heart to the rhythmic crash upon crash. They'd finally gotten around to it, this part of the conversation. Inevitable, it was, she reasoned. They couldn't talk about the conference all night. But the topic had come up on them far sooner than she'd expected.

"Well, a girl doesn't lose a baby every day, does she?"

To his immense credit, he did not play defense. Though Hermione would not have held it against him if he had. This was the first time they'd broached the subject since the fight, since she'd told him to go fuck himself in no less polite terms.

"I shouldn't have left you, Hermione. No doubt. I thought it was what you wanted. And when I realized I was wrong I should have come back. But I was… Scared."

"The things we faced when we were younger, and now we scare each other," she mused.

"Well, you were younger then, when we faced him. I feel as if I was never young."

"Funny. Neither do I. Not anymore."

There was no malice, no resentment in her voice for Snape. There was only acceptance and the statement of fact. She had stopped hating him long ago, just after she'd stopped hating herself. But it still hurt. She'd been pregnant for the first time in her life, and Severus Snape, her lover of nearly a year, was the father. But that was not what had started the fights. She had refused to marry him, insisting that she didn't believe him to be truly in love with her. But her insistence only proved that it was she who did not know him, for Severus was madly in love with her. And though he told her that a million times it seemed, she was convinced that he was too damaged and burdened with a past that was not of his own choosing. Hermione did not want to rope him into a future over which he had even less control.

But she'd been so drastically wrong. The anger she saw in his eyes as they screamed at each other in Hermione's sitting room at the Consortium was his fear of losing her, not of being coerced into a ready-made family that he did not want. The lamp was thrown and she demanded he get out, and when he refused, she'd made to slap him. He'd grabbed her wrist and in her fury she twisted and pushed. They had never been violent once before with each other, but their anger and their frustrations and their fear poured out over each other. Finally he'd pushed her down on the sofa and left in disgust. Hermione curled on the sofa, leaking tears and eventually blood, visited the medi-witch on duty that night in the lab's clinic. Hermione had been three months along.

"When I found out," he said, shaking her from her revere, "I wanted very much to come to you. But it had been a year. And then one year turned into two, and suddenly I realized that perhaps, if you wanted me to have known, you would have told me yourself. It was stupid, I know. But I was so sure you hated me."

"I did," she replied. "But not because I blamed you. If I'd hated only myself I would have lost the little I had had left, my career. And if I'd hated anyone else, I would have lost them, too. You were gone, so… Hating you was easy."

Almost a quarter of an hour passed before either one of them spoke again.

"If you tell me to go to hell, that's perfectly all right. But I'd like it very much if you came back to my room with me-- Nothing so scandalous," he added quickly. "It's just cold, and I could use a drink."

She considered this offer, benign and friendly, simple and honest, for a moment, then nodded. "Under one condition."

"Name it."

"We move on? And never speak of this again? I've spent five years with this scar, and I don't think I can rip it open once more. Do you understand?"

It was Snape's turn to consider her. He'd been broken into so many pieces by so many different kinds of people over the years. He couldn't honestly say he was eager to dwell on something he too had spent almost five years coming to terms with.

"Under… One condition," he ventured. She did not speak, but she looked intrigued. "We actually move on. I've been in stasis since I left you, and I'm not keen on stagnation. When we're done with this stupid conference, come back to my home in Manchester for a while? You don't have to marry me or anything, I'm not going to pretend every single thing is right between us. But I'd like to try again."

Hermione, who had been looking at him very earnestly during this short but touching speech, looked away now and wiped at her cheek briskly. She nodded a bit and said, "Well, let's go get that drink, then?"


End file.
